Description

The question of how to conceptualize the relationships between governments and the everyday lives of women has long been the focus of attention among feminists. Feminist scholarship critiques women's lives, experiences and gender inequality in a variety of contexts. In this age of increased internationalism, we are witness to government actor's attempts to use women's alleged `vulnerability' to justify its humanitarian interventions. Regulating the International Movement of Women interrogates western government's uses of discourses of human vulnerability as a tool to regulate non-western women's migration. In this collection of provocatively argued essays, the contributors wish to reclaim the concept of racialised and gendered vulnerability, from its under theorized, and thus, ambiguous location in feminist's theory, in a variety of methodological and geographical contexts. The book addresses the human geographer, the socio-legal and critical scholar, the sociologist, the cultural, postcolonial and political theorists and practitioners. This unique text will be of value to academics, postgraduate and research students of any of the above disciplines, as well as practitioners interested in theoretical and empirical discussions of the state, normativity and the regulation of women's cross-border mobility.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Identifying the Problematic: Why Does Vulnerability Matter?, Sharron A. FitzGerald (Editor); 1.Constructing Vulnerabilities and Managing Risk: State responses to forced marriage; 2. Safe spaces for dykes in danger? Refugee law’s production of vulnerable lesbians, Sarah Keenan; 3. Roma, free movement and gendered exclusion in the enlarged European Union, Heli Askola, 4. Life on the margins: A feminist counter-topography of H-2B workers, Deborah Dixon, 5. Vulnerability, silence and pathways to resistance: The case of migrant women in Greece, Nadina Chritopolou and Gabriella Lazaridis, 6. Crossing border, inhabiting spaces: The (in)credibility of sexual violence in asylum appeals, 7. Perspectives on trafficking and the Policing and Crime Act 2009: Challenging notions of vulnerability through a Butlerian lens, Anna Carline, 8.Vulnerability and sex trafficking in the United Kingdom, Sharron A.Fitzgerald; 9. Moral and legal obligations of the state to victims of sex trafficking: Vulnerability and beyond, Tsachi Keren-Paz.

About the Editor

Sharron Fitzgerald is based at the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University